Five-year-old Miles already has experience fighting villains – he’s been facing off with acute lymphoblastic leukemia since he was 20 months old. With his cancer in remission and his last bout of chemotherapy finished in June, his biggest wish was to continue living his life heroically. “He wanted to be Batman,” said Patricia Wilson, the Make-A-Wish Foundation’s Bay Area executive director. We can do that, Wilson thought, and she began putting the call out to volunteers to help turn San Francisco into Gotham City for a day for the boy from Tulelake (Siskiyou County).

It might as well have been a worldwide Bat-Signal. Word of the foundation’s efforts spread quickly on social media, and soon what started as a small effort to make a 5-year-old boy a hero for the day turned into a citywide extravaganza, with support and volunteers coming in from all over. On Friday, by Make-A-Wish’s count, thousands of volunteers will cheer on “Batkid” as he defeats the Riddler and the Penguin at locations around San Francisco. The mayor will present Miles with a key to the city. Police Chief Greg Suhr will step in as Commissioner Gordon to alert Miles when his heroics are needed.

VC, exactly. The president has done what he had to do. He’s got experts on the website who are improving it by leaps and bounds every day. He provided a “fix” for junk insurance lovers and he’s moving on. Meanwhile he’s got a whole portfolio of important things that are getting done every day. Now Harry Reid just has to fix the filibuster so the president’s appointments can go through. And WE have to give him a Democratic congress in 2014, not only to help him and all of us move forward, but to deliver a great big spit in the eye to the media and the Koch owned GOP minions in Congress.

The P5+1 talks with Iran in Geneva late last week produced a lot of drama – foreign ministers unexpectedly clearing their schedules and flying in, reports of disunity among the P5+1 partners, post-midnight negotiating sessions, media speculation about a breakdown, and finger-pointing about whom to blame. One might have thought the negotiations on the Iran nuclear issue had hit a brick wall and were at the point of collapse.

The reality is more tame. Although expectations had been raised for an announcement of a deal before the end of the week, the difficulties of managing a highly complex negotiation involving several independent and strong-willed countries in a compressed period of time became apparent. So, while making very impressive progress in just a few days, the talks could not quite come to closure. There will be another opportunity to do so in a week’s time.

A former senior Obama Administration official told the House Foreign Affairs Committee today that the deal proposed to Iran by the P5+1 countries in Geneva last weekend would “double Iran’s breakout time.”

An entire city can make a wish come true for a youngster..they can all work together to make this happen….you know why? Because they WANTED IT TO WORK FOR THIS CHILD. They WANTED to grant his wish! Congressman could learn a thing or fifty from this.

Well said, Bob! Honestly…what SF did as a caring community to grant this wish for this child….AMAZING! The other guys just want to collect a paycheck and get outta dodge. They care nothing about anyone but themselves.

…..“There is a tendency when these kind of things happen to blame the correspondent whose voice and face was on the story, but whatever happened and however it happened, people in the corporate hierarchy of CBS News and leaders of the news division share at least as much of whatever blame there is to be as the correspondent, but they try to make it appear their fingerprints aren’t on it,” Rather said.

….”I just know this, that No. One, I’m always pulling for CBS News, and I hope they’ll be transparent, look into this and tell what they know and try to move on from it. No. Two, there is a difference between this and the trouble I got into at CBS News,” Rather said. “We got into trouble, that is I and the other reporters, because we reported a true story…the difficulty with this Benghazi story, that they now acknowledge, the story was not true and they stood by it for a long time.”

“On closer inspection, the claim that President Obama lied in saying that people could keep their insurance looks like another Fox News special. In the only way that the pledge could be interpreted as being meaningful, the pledge is true. The ACA does not eliminate plans that were in existence at the time the bill was approved.

If we want to play Fox News, President Obama also promised people they could keep their doctor. Since 2010 tens of thousands of doctors have retired or even died. Guess the pledge that people could keep their doctor was yet another lie from the Obama administration.”

That top photo is a block away from where I live!! Such a sweet young kid who played out his fantasy wish to perfection. The whole city came together for the SF Make a Wish Foundation – City Hall, Police and Fire Dept, local news networks, the SF Chronicle, the Cable Car system, the Giants organization and lots and lots of local shops and 12,000 volunteers, lots of other stuff too numerous to mention. Such a great feeling of love and friendship and camaraderie for this little boy and his family. As POTUS always says:

Doubt if the Oregonian will print my letter to the editor, but we should all give it a try with our local paper. Here’s my attempt at rational discourse:

Letters to the editor, The Oregonian

R.E. front-page article, Obama bends on health cancellations 11/15/13

If you received a cancellation letter from you insurance company, don’t try to hang on to your sub-standard policy without calling Cover Oregon first at 1-855-268-3767 to find out if you could get a better deal. Individuals making up to $45,960 and families of 4 up to $92,400 may be eligible for federal subsidies which you won’t get if you keep you old policy.

The Affordable Care Act grandfathered all the individual policies that were in place at the time the law was enacted, hence President Obama’s statement that you could keep your plan if you liked it. There were limits on the amount of increase in premiums or deductibles to keep this grandfathered status. The plans being cancelled because they don’t meet the minimal standards were introduced by private insurers after passage of the ACA, knowing they wouldn’t be in compliance by 1/1/14. The insurers should have disclosed this when they issued the policy. Now they are trying to blame their lack of transparency on the President.

BREAKING NEWS: The missus is now a gainfully employed person!!! She’s working hospice, which she’s always wanted to do. Her first shift is Sunday from 12 – 8am. Our wonderpup Stewie is going to have to get used to Mom leaving for work at all sorts of odd hours.

I am now going to plop on the bed and zone out to sports. We’ve been out and about all day.

The Obama administration has said that HealthCare.gov will be “working smoothly for the vast majority of users” by the end of November. They’ve brought in Jeff Zients, a former corporate executive, to save the ailing website from its disastrous launch. So how are they doing?

They’re making serious progress, Zients said on a Friday conference call with reporters.

The administration is judging its improvement by two metrics, Zients said: the website’s response times and its error rates. In other words, how long it takes a page to load for users and how often users encounter a crash or error page.

In both areas, Zients reported, HealthCare.gov is improving exponentially.

“That this question is even on people’s minds is a rather grim reflection of the Obama administration’s record on press freedoms,” he said in an e-mail. “It is a positive step that the Attorney General expressly recognizes that journalism is not and should not be a crime in the United States, but given this administration’s poor record on press freedoms, I’ll consult with my counsel on whether one can or should rely on such caveat-riddled oral assertions about the government’s intentions.”

You guys are the greatest! I love visiting here. :) There are SO many good tweets, articles and thoughts out there. A very strong feeling of being together with President Obama, ObamaCare and all the good things he and we all wish for each other. Just saw this one tweet of many

Hey, I resent that, Amk! I always mean my compliments. Remember when I told you your eyes were like diamonds? Well, they were sparkling at the thought of squeezing out some $$$$$ from me for some measly service or other.

Excellent post!
I keep coming back to read the tweets. So amazing to see and feel love in one place at one time.
We truly deserve this President and we all love him for the hard, dedicated, caring work he is doing.
#We Are NOT going back! We will move FORWARD!
Thank you, Ms. Chips, UT and everyone here for just being here.

“Longtime Seattle City Councilmember Richard Conlin has conceded his seat to challenger Kshama Sawant. …. Sawant, who will be the first socialist on the council in recent memory, was carrying only 46.1 percent of the vote on election night, but has steadily gained ground since.